The Gaming Industry has grown increasingly important in terms of economic value and social concern during recent years. Generally, the U.S. Gaming Industry has revenues that may reach $60 billion annually and provides hundreds of thousands of jobs. However, the association of the Gaming Industry with social problems and crime is also widely recognized. Some estimates hold that there are more pages of government regulation related to gambling than there are for regulating the nuclear industry. In addition history indicates that gambling related political corruption become so prevalent in the 1800's that every state outlawed lotteries and other forms of gambling. Since gambling has again expanded numerous cases of political corruption have been exposed. Clearly, the Gaming Industry has both benefits and Risks.
Compliance officers and other financial institution personnel typically have few resources available to assist them with the identification of present or potential global risks associated with a particular entity or transaction involving the Gaming Industry. Risks can be multifaceted and far reaching. The amount of information that needs to be considered to evaluate whether involvement with a Gaming Industry entity poses a significant risk or should otherwise be restricted, is substantial.
However, institutions do not have available a mechanism which can provide real time assistance to assess one or more risk variables associated with the Gaming Industry, or otherwise qualitatively manage such risk. In the event of an investment problem, it is often difficult to quantify to regulatory bodies, shareholders, newspapers and/or other interested parties, the diligence exercised by the financial institution to properly identify and respond to risk factors. Absent a means to quantify good business practices and diligent efforts to contain risk, a financial institution may appear to be negligent in some respect.
General data services that are available to search news sources and other public information will accept a query and return a result. However, such services are not integrated into a risk management system. In addition, present data services only return a flat response to a query submitted without any further data mining or scrubbing. The inefficiency of having to manually ascertain what terms should be searched and then submit query that includes those terms makes these systems overbearing on a transaction by transaction basis. Also, over time, databases can accrue a wide range of inaccuracies and inconsistencies, such as misspelled names, inverted text, missing fields, alternate spelling of key phrases, and other blemishes. Fixing such faulty records by hand on a timeframe needed to perform risk management associated with a financial transaction may be impossible as well as expensive and could result in the introduction of even more errors. What is needed is a method and system to draw upon information gathered globally and utilize the information to assist with risk management and due diligence related to financial transactions. A new method and system should anticipate scrubbing data from multiple sources in order to facilitate merging data from all necessary sources. In addition, data mining should be made available to ascertain patterns or anomalies in the query results. Risk information should also be situated to be conveyed to a compliance department and be able to demonstrate to regulators that a financial institution has met standards relating to risk containment.
Currently there is no convenient way to facilitate a comprehensive analysis of a Gaming Industry related entity without strenuous research of multiple disparate sources. What is needed is a tool to facilitate analysis of Gaming Industry related subjects.